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Ravel: Piano Concerto for the Left Hand in D Major

Maurice Ravel: Born: March 7, 1875, in Ciboure, Basses-Pyrénées, France. Died: December 28, 1937, in Paris, France.
Concerto for the Left Hand: Composition: 1929 to fall 1930. Premiere: January 5, 1932, in the Grosser Musikvereinsaal, Vienna, with Paul Wittgenstein, piano, and the Vienna Symphony Orchestra conducted by Robert Heger.

Ravel composed the Concerto for the Left Hand for the Austrian pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who lost his right arm in the First World War yet continued to have a successful concert career. Wittgenstein developed an astonishing left-hand technique, wrote a treatise on the subject, and commissioned pieces from major composers. Ravel was impressed enough to set aside other work in favour of Wittgenstein’s commission, which he finished quickly, in the fall of 1930. (It was one of his final works. During his last four years, plagued by deteriorating physical and mental health, he was unable to compose.) Wittgenstein received exclusive performing rights for six years, and though he and Ravel squabbled about interpretation, Ravel conducted him in the Paris première, in 1933.
Intrigued by the challenge of writing for a one-armed pianist, Ravel studied left-hand works by Saint-Saëns and Godowsky. His goal, he said, was “to give the impression of a texture no thinner than that of a part written for both hands”—and he did succeed spectacularly in making one hand do the work of two and hold its own against a large orchestra. Far from seeming limited, the concerto is grand, heroic, virtuosic (the piano is introduced in a splashy cadenza). It is serious, too. Ravel called it “solemn”; it is also variously tormented, violent, even tragic, though rife with sardonic humour, too, and occasionally playful. Altogether, a masterpiece of great power and stunning originality.
It is a single movement in two parts: a stately preamble and a quick, propulsive finale that Ravel dubbed a “scherzo.” The music is stylistically eclectic. Sometimes it sounds like Rachmaninov, other times like tart, brittle, Stravinskian neoclassicism. Some passages sound “Oriental,” others feature Spanish rhythms—fandango, bolero. (Ravel considered Spain his second home, and spent time in the Basque country, where he was born, while writing this concerto.) There are jazz effects, too—a bluesy horn theme at the beginning, and, in the “scherzo,” ragtime-like syncopated rhythms, “blue” notes, jazz-band sonorities. (Ravel was a fan of Gershwin.) But if eclectic, the concerto is also tightly unified: the “scherzo” is based on the themes from the preamble, though the derivations can be subtle to the point of undetectable.

Programme Note by Kevin Bazzana

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